The key ideas

Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

Judson Brewer, 2021

Why won't worry let go, even when you know it's useless? Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Judson Brewer shows that anxiety is a habit held in place by a hidden reward, which is why willpower can't argue it away. You will learn how to map your anxiety loops, why the brain drops a habit only once it sees the habit's real cost, and how curiosity helps you ride out a wave of anxiety instead of fighting it.

Who it is for

For people who replay the same anxious thoughts over and over and can't stop. And for people who stress-eat, put things off or scroll for hours, and suspect there is something bigger than laziness behind it.

It's hard to take yourself too seriously when you're saying "hmm".

The thoughts that keep you awake

It's half past one in the morning. Tomorrow you have an important talk with your boss, and your head replays it again and again: what they'll ask, what you'll answer, what happens if it all goes badly. You get no more answers, and no more sleep. Yet somehow it's hard to stop, as if the moment you stop thinking, something important will slip away.

Judson Brewer is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. For more than twenty years he has studied how the brain gets hooked: on cigarettes, on food, on its own thoughts. His academic home is Brown University in the United States. He knows anxiety not only from his patients: during his medical training he had panic attacks himself. In this book he combines research on habits with mindfulness, the ability to notice what is happening to you right now.

The book's central idea sounds strange at first: anxiety is a habit. The brain learns it the same way it learns to reach for something sweet, and holds on to it just as tightly. That's why it's almost impossible to talk anxiety down with sensible arguments. It lives deeper than the part of the brain that reasons.

Brewer offers another way, and it has three steps. First, see your anxiety loops. Then take an honest look at what they give you. And finally, offer your brain something it will like more than worry. This path runs not through willpower but through attention, and anyone can walk it.

Fear plus uncertainty equals anxiety

Brewer boils the birth of anxiety down to a simple formula: fear plus uncertainty. Fear on its own is useful. It helped early humans remember where a predator lived and keep away from that spot. The brain learned fast: danger, escape, relief. Next time there was no need to think.

The trouble starts when danger isn't visible, only possible. Your test results will be ready in a week, your boss has written "come see me", the news talks about layoffs. The brain doesn't have enough data to make a forecast, and it hates that. Brewer puts it plainly: our brains are built to do everything they can to reduce uncertainty.

Forecasting is the job of the prefrontal cortex, the youngest part of the brain, the part that makes plans. When it has enough information, it works out what comes next and settles down. When it doesn't, Brewer says, it starts running through possibilities, each scarier than the last. Planning for the future is useful, he notes. But fear of the future sets worry spinning in circles.

That gives the book its first conclusion. Anxiety is not a malfunction and not a weakness of character. It is an old survival system that switches on where there is nowhere to run and nothing to run from.

Read in Livria

About the author

Judson Brewer is an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist and a professor at Brown University. He has studied addiction, habits and mindfulness for more than twenty years.

All books by this author: Judson Brewer

Terms from the book

  • Prefrontal cortex
  • Procrastination
  • Mindfulness
  • McDonald
  • Burnout
  • Neuroscientist
  • Fast food
  • Brown
  • Orbitofrontal cortex
  • Disenchantment
  • RAIN
  • Trigger
  • Gear: An image from Brewer's book, not a scientific term: he calls the three steps of his method first, second and third gear, as in a car.
  • Reward value: A concept from research on learning: how pleasant the brain judges the result of a behavior to be. According to Brewer, only updating this value changes a habit.
  • Self-judgment: The habit of scolding and criticizing yourself for slip-ups. Brewer describes it as one more loop that feeds anxiety.
  • Bigger better offer: Brewer's phrase for a new behavior that gives the brain more pleasure than the old habit, and so can replace it.
  • Litman: Jordan Litman, an American researcher of curiosity. In 2006, together with Paul Silvia, he described its two kinds.
  • Silvia: Paul Silvia, an American researcher of interest, curiosity and creativity.
  • Deprivation curiosity: A kind of curiosity that comes from a gap in what you know and feels like an unpleasant itch until you find the answer.
  • Interest curiosity: A kind of curiosity in which finding things out is a pleasure in itself, with no gap that needs filling.
  • Mahasi Sayadaw: A twentieth century Burmese Buddhist monk and meditation teacher who made the practice of noting well known: silently naming what is happening in each moment.
  • Five-finger breathing: A simple exercise from the book: trace the outline of one hand with a finger of the other, breathing in on the way up and out on the way down.
  • GAD-7: A short questionnaire of seven questions used to measure how strong anxiety is.
  • Pilot study: A small preliminary study that tests whether a large, rigorous one is worth running.

All terms

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